He was born less than 2 years after Lu Xun on Sado Island in the Sea of Japan.  He was given the name Kita Terujiro.  He later adopted the pen name Kita Ikki for his published writings.  He was educated at the prestigious Waseda University in Tokyo.

Kita modified his overall thinking during his career.  The crucial turning point was his involvement in the 1911 Chinese revolution. [29]

This was a period of naturalism and realism in Japanese literature.  Some would say that Kita was a fanatic.  He was on cocaine the last thirty years of his life.  He started as treatment for childhood eye injury.  The use of cocaine lead to visions and seeing ghosts. Kita Ikki was “a frail, one-eyed visionary, clad in a Chinese robe”.[30]

Kita promoted a pan-Asian movement.  He wanted Chinese to free themselves from Western domination.  The Chinese did not see the Japanese as liberators. According to his political program, a coup d'état would be necessary as to impose a more-or-less totalitarian regime based on a direct rule by the emperor so Kita would suspend the Constitution and radically reorganize the Diet to be free of any "malign influence." The new "National Reorganization Diet" would nationalize certain strategic industries, impose limits on individual wealth and private property, enact a land reform to benefit the farmers, as to strengthen Japan enable it to liberate Asia from Western imperialism.

This Kita termed the Shōwa Restoration.

In Kita’s first major treatise, The Theory of National Purity and Pure Socialism, he proposed an identity between ancient political society and socialism and equated the traditional absence of private property with the diminished role of state structure.  To him the emperor symbolized the common ownership of property and hence a communal form of social existence.[31]

He became convinced of the importance of the imperial figure as a unifying principle of politics.  In his estimation the Chinese revolution failed precisely because of its leadership’s inability to establish a persuasive centralized political order.  …  While still in Shanghai, Kita began to draft his program for total political reorganization, in a tract called An Outline Plan for the Reorganization of the Japanese State.[32]  Originally published in 1919 and then republished in 1923, the book was heavily censored by the authorities, but clandestine uncensored copies circulated among his adherents.[33]

In his Outline Plan “he advocated overthrowing the prevailing leadership in a swift and conclusive coup d’état.  By reconstituting the structure of authority, he believed, Japan would rid itself of Western political institutions and economic practices as a necessary condition for a final confrontation in Asia.”[35]

Underlying Kita’s writings is a sense of national crisis unleashed by capitalist and bureaucratic exploitation and leading to extreme inequality and misery in society.[36]

He saw the importance of the emperor not so much an institution that had survived from ancient times but as a symbol of community. … In Japan, Kita argued, the imperial institution had been preserved to represent the national culture, but its potential as a social monarchy had been suppressed by the rise of bourgeois and bureaucratic politics within the constitutional order. …. Kita was indifferent to the idea of a divine emperor.[37]

Kita’s theory of revolution depended on establishing the principle of a “people’s emperor” as a necessary condition for the eventual implementation of a socialist order. … The new socialist order in Japan would come without class warfare yet would include the new forces of industry and science.  A socialist revolution in Japan, moreover, would be the first step in a chain reaction leading to the liberation of all Asian countries from Western political and economic domination.[38]

The Japanese flag, he boasted, would one day be emblazoned on the minds of all Asian people … darkness … would be lifted in the near future when Japan engaged the West in a conclusive naval confrontation. …  Only through such an “ultimate war” would peace and power in Asia be secured.[39]

Once cleansed of foreign impurities, “he wrote, a revitalized Japan was destined to triumph in the cataclysm of nation-states at war.”[40]According to Kita: “after making India independent and China autonomous, the Rising Sun Flag of Japan shall offer the light of the sun to all mankind”[41]

Kita advocated the total abolition of the use of Chinese ideographs.[43]  He “warned that the English language poisoned the Japanese mind and should be replaced with Esperanto.”[44] 

While Kita himself mostly pursued a quiet, apolitical life of teaching[46] his Outline Plan became popular with young army officers.

They were especially attracted to some of the most incendiary aspects of his plan, which called for the replacement of the ruling elite by a coup d’état, the suspension of the Constitution, and imposition of martial law.  His ideas combined democracy, imperialism, and fascism in a self-contradictory brew that nevertheless intoxicated a growing number of the enthusiasts in the military.[47]

On February 26, 1936, 1400 soldiers attempted a military coup.  They assassinated some key government leaders and called on the military to rise up.  “The main object of the rebels was to wipe out the leaders of Government and the elder statesmen who advised them and the Emperor.  They would thus, they believed, create a vacuum which only the army could fill.”[48]

The rebels were defeated but their military leaders now had an excuse to take complete control of the country.  Kita was put away, tried in a military court, and executed as a communist in 1937.    (Lu Xun’s death was just a year earlier).

Enshrined thereafter as a martyr, Kita’s image resurfaced in future decades in conservative Japanese literature.  Nor did his death and that of the insurrectionists slow the momentum toward a military takeover of the government: Many officers who had been sympathetic to the goals of the rebels remained in the ranks.[54]